Do widgets that update badly drain your battery?

I have a Droid and my sister has an Eris. We were at the sportsbar today and from about 12:30-4pm my phone used about 40% of its juice and I never made a phonecall. I was texting and sporadically using the internet but nothing crazy. I even turned wifi off and set the screen to its dimmest option. She was using hers about the same and hardly used any power

These are my apps and widgets, can you guys ID any that are battery killers? If I can't get 6-9 hours out of my phone without charging it I don't know how this is gonna work

The things that extremely helped out my battery life were turning off GPS and lowering the screen timeout. It was at a minute, but I lowered it to 15 seconds.

However, the 15 seconds seems to be way too fast. It gets annoying when I'm playing a game, thinking of a move, and the screen times out on me. So maybe 30 seconds is more sufficient.

Click to expand...

Search for an app called KeepScreen. It let's you override the screen timeout setting for whatever apps you wish. So basically with KeepScreen you could set your game as one of the apps that would not follow the 15 sec screen timeout. I find it very useful.

The things that extremely helped out my battery life were turning off GPS and lowering the screen timeout. It was at a minute, but I lowered it to 15 seconds.

However, the 15 seconds seems to be way too fast. It gets annoying when I'm playing a game, thinking of a move, and the screen times out on me. So maybe 30 seconds is more sufficient.

Click to expand...

Search for an app called KeepScreen. It let's you override the screen timeout setting for whatever apps you wish. So basically with KeepScreen you could set your game as one of the apps that would not follow the 15 sec screen timeout. I find it very useful.

Click to expand...

+1 on KeepScreen. I like it more-so than Screebl. Keep screen doesn't use the screens orientation to determine whether or not it stays on... you simply add an app to the list and Keep Screen runs silently in the background and will not allow the phone to sleep when these apps are open in the foreground.

Battery Left is the only widget I've used that seemed to seriously ding my battery life (based on anecdotal use/time till charge) and it may have just been an accuracy issue since I didn't let it drain to zero. It never showed up as more than 2% in the battery stats, but I didn't check if sleep/wake was being affected. Other than that, I kill gps and wifi unless I need them and battery life is great, even constantly using the phone as a streaming audio device.

Spare Parts allows you to look at which apps are waking the phone from sleep...perhaps this would help track it down. Did it used to be better and something changed?

Google Voice. Seriously. There might be some others, but that one definitely goes berzerk on your phone.

I just bought an Evo recently, and I knew it didn't have the best battery life, but I didn't it to die within 10-12 hours from doing NOTHING (seriously, basically just picking it up to check the battery status once an hour). It was so bad, after the first hour of me waking up, which is when I take it off the charger, I lost 10%.

I loved the way Google Voice integrated so nicely in my phone (I only used the Voicemail) that I decided it was going on my wife's Samsung Moment. She got excellent battery life before, but after I put it on, it basically went from 60 to 0 during the course of the evening (where it'd normally have a good 30-40% left before bed).

Well, that obviously got me thinking, so I first just tried turning off syncing for Google Voice. When that wasn't making a difference, I tried just uninstalling it all together. Bam... suddenly, I'm getting between 30-36 hours on my phone depending on usage.

After knowing what to Google for, I searched "Google Voice android battery drain" and I found TONS of other people who experienced the same thing.

I'm not sure what's going on with the Google Voice app that it drained our batteries so fast, as I find it hard to believe that the push syncing would be solely responsible for reducing my battery life to 33% capacity, but something's definitely going on, and it was the culprit in both of our cases. It wasn't just syncing either. Right now after the fact I'm syncing 4 email accounts, and I usually leave GTalk running a few hours during the day. It's something specific to Google Voice.

Just try it out one night. Uninstall Google Voice, maybe even reboot the phone just in case, and see what happens.

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